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Is That "Sexting" Pic Illegal? A Scientific Test
A county district attorney in Pennsylvania has threatened to file felony child pornography charges against three teenage girls for pictures that they took of themselves, even though the girls' lawyers say the pictures are clearly not sexually explicit and do not meet the legal definition of child porn. The American Civil Liberties Union has countered by asking a federal judge to block District Attorney George Skumanick from filing charges.
Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers, but according to the reported descriptions, one picture shows two of the girls flashing the peace sign in their bras, and the other picture shows a girl wrapped in a towel with her breasts exposed after stepping out of the shower. Unless there's something very significant being deliberately left out of those descriptions, it sounds pretty obvious that the pictures do not meet the definition of child pornography, which requires sexual explicitness, not just nudity.
Skumanick may even sound like a buffoon for threatening to prosecute the girls over those pictures, but his overreaching is probably an example of the "context syndrome" that I referred to in writing about a Wikipedia article about a CD showing a naked underage girl on the cover. In that article, I wrote:
Suppose you read a news article about a man who was arrested for possession of child pornography, and you happened to see a sample of the images (never mind how) that he was arrested for. And suppose the Virgin Killer album cover photo had been mixed in with those images. Would it have jumped out at you as an obvious case of over-reaching by the police?
In other words, even an obviously legal photo might seem illegal when it's mixed in with a group of photos that constitute actual child porn. According to the AP, Skumanick's office first found the photos in question after confiscating students' cell phones and rounding up 20 students accused of making or distributing the images found on the phones. Some of those other photos were presumably racy enough to meet the definition of child pornography, and Skumanick probably just lumped in the bra and towel pictures into that category without thinking too much about it. Giving him credit, if someone had come to his office and shown him the picture of the towel girl by itself and asked him to prosecute the girl for creating child pornography, he might have said that it didn't meet the legal definition.
But the "context syndrome" only excuses the initial mistake, and only partly. By now, he's had time to think about those particular pictures, and he knows that non-sexually-explicit photos do not constitute child pornography, so what is he doing? He claims that the girls in their bras were posed "provocatively", but that's not the same as sexual explicitness, and he hasn't even made that claim about the towel picture, so unless there's some bombshell piece of information about the photos that he's still keeping secret (and why would he?), there's no excuse for him not to drop the threats of prosecution right away.
But could even the initial mistake have been avoided? I think it could have, if you designed a scientific procedure for deciding, objectively, whether an image meets the legal definition of "child pornography", by borrowing some of the principles used in police lineups.
Now, obviously one big difference between deciding if the right suspect has been identified in a lineup, and deciding whether an image constitutes child pornography, is that the question of a suspect's identity in a lineup is a question about objective reality, while the question of whether an image is "child pornography" is a matter of opinion and consensus about an imprecisely defined English phrase, so it may sound odd to try and find a "scientifically objective" answer. But by "objective", I mean that the procedure should eliminate the influence of factors that are not relevant to the legal definition of child pornography (for example, if asking someone to decide if they think a picture meets the definition, don't tell them whether the photo was found in a pedophile's basement or in a parent's photo album, because under the strict legal definition, that shouldn't matter). And by "scientific", I mean that the Yes/No answers returned by the procedure should be repeatable as far as possible, so that different defendants aren't being tried under wildly different standards, where Bob is convicted of possessing an innocuous photo while Alice is acquitted even though she possessed a racier one.
A naive solution, from a scientific point of view, would be to poll a random sample of lawyers or other professionals in a police go-to database, and ask them to evaluate whether the picture is child pornography, without any information about where the picture came from. These results would be objective (if the respondents didn't know the source of the picture), and would generally be repeatable, if the sample size is large enough. The problem with this method is that while all defendants would be held to the same standard, all citizens would not be. Suppose the lawyers in the go-to list start to decide, as many of them probably would, that anybody who is being prosecuted for possessing a picture of a topless underage girl is probably a pedophile creep anyway, and would start voting "child pornography" for all but the most obviously legal pictures. The prosecutor would realize this, and would know that they could threaten to ruin people's lives by charging them with possession of child pornography because of pictures found in their possession -- even while other members of society possessed similar pictures without ever being charged.
Here's where the analogy to a police lineup comes in. Police lineups are supposed to include "known innocent" candidates in order to test the credibility of the eyewitness; if the eyewitness selects a candidate who could not have possibly committed the crime (because, for example, they were in jail), then the police know the eyewitness is not reliable. (This was one guideline notoriously violated by District Attorney Mike Nifong in the Duke lacrosse team rape trial; he assembled a lineup consisting only of lacrosse team members from the party, so that whomever the eyewitness identified was guaranteed to fall under a cloud of suspicion.) In the same vein, the lawyers or other experts being consulted by the police could be shown a "lineup" of photos, consisting of several photos that were determined in advance to be legal (either because of a prior court ruling, or perhaps just because the D.A. had declined to prosecute the photos on previous occasions), along with the photo whose legality was in question. Ask the experts to pick which photo they think is closest to the definition of child pornography. Unless most of them pick the photo that's on trial, then that photo can't be said to be worse than any of the other photos that had already been deemed legal.
This is closer to a fair solution, but there's still a big loophole. When police assemble candidates for a lineup, they are supposed to pick candidates who match the general physical description given by the eyewitness. If the eyewitness said they were attacked by a redhead, the police can't fill out the lineup with one redheaded suspect that they want to railroad, and 10 blondes. Because attributes like "Caucasian" and "redhead" are pretty straightforward, if the rules for lineups are being enforced properly, the police don't have a lot of wiggle room to fill out the lineup with candidates who blatantly don't match the description. Unfortunately, it would be a lot easier to cheat when creating a "lineup" of photos to compare against a photo whose owner was on trial for possessing child pornography. If the photo at issue is probably legal but still provocative, then the police could fill out the rest of the lineup with completely non-sexual but perhaps eyebrow-raising photos, like a naked teenage girl watering some houseplants. Then when the police ask, "Which of these does not belong?", everybody would pick the provocative one, and the police would take that as "vindication".
The only way I can think of to guard against this, would be to let the defense counsel pick the other photos in the lineup, and then they could pick the most "provocative" ones that were still legal! For any photos that have been declared legal in the past, the defense ought to be able to argue that if an independent panel of experts doesn't think their client's pictures are any worse than those, then their client should not be prosecuted either. (If the defense lawyer decided their client was a child molester and wanted to throw them to the wolves, they could deliberately pick non-sexual photos for the lineup, so that their client's photo gets pegged as the odd one out -- but when the defense lawyer decides to railroad their own client, it's almost impossible for the system to guard against that anyway. Also, it's probably not a good idea to make this an option for child pornography defendants who decide to represent themselves, so that they can rifle through thousands of photographs of naked children, even legal ones, to find the pictures that they think are the "sexiest" to use for their defense.)
Perhaps someone can think of a better method that is still roughly scientific, in the sense of trying everyone according to the same standard and giving repeatable results. The irony is that despite the potential of child pornography charges to destroy a person's life, it is in possible in principle to try child pornography cases more objectively than almost any other type of crime, because you can separate out the alleged criminal act from everything else about the defendant, and let people examine the evidence of criminality in isolation. If someone shoots a person and claims it was self-defense, it's hard to imagine how you could distill out only the relevant facts of the case, and pass along just those facts to some third-party observer who then renders a judgment without knowing anything else. Half the courtroom battle is over what facts are "relevant" in the first place. But in the case of a child pornography charge, you can give the photo -- and no other information -- to an expert, and ask them to make a judgment.
I know, I know. The police and prosecutors are not actually doing to do this. But that in itself says something. Even if it's not possible to try most crimes in a truly objective fashion, why don't the courts and the police do this when it is possible? Many first-year psychology students that have an intuitive grasp of the principles of sound double-blind testing, could probably come up with a procedure better than the one I've described. When you've spent long enough thinking about how to design experiments objectively, you can't even hear about lawyers arguing over whether a photo constitutes child pornography, without the thought popping into your head: "Have a group of experts look at the photo and rate it, independently of each other. Compare the results to a 'control' result where the experts look at a photo that is not child pornography." And so on. Why don't those suggestions ever come from within the legal profession itself?
And on the flip side, what about using scientific methods to examine facts about the legal system? When considering that judges are tasked with evaluating parties' claims in an objective and fair manner, one could ask: Are they really being objective? What are different ways that we could test this? Perhaps by having two actors in different courtrooms on the same day, charged with exactly the same crime under the same circumstances, except one is black and the other is white, and repeat the experiment many times to see if they receive different average sentences. For a scientist, the idea is the most natural thing in the world. Forget the fact that the legal system doesn't do this -- why is virtually nobody in the legal profession even suggesting it?
Probably because most people who think in terms of objective experimental design are drawn towards the hard sciences, not toward law. That's probably a good thing; such people can likely do more good as physicists and research psychologists than they could as lawyers and policemen. But they can still speak out for the principles of science to be applied wherever possible, in any area where objectivity is important -- especially the law.
All true scientists at heart should keep telling the world that "science" is not just a label that encompasses nerd subjects like biology, physics, and chemistry, with other subjects like art and law being "outside the domain of science". While the statements made within the framework of those subjects are not scientific ("This painting is pretty", "The court finds the defendant not liable", etc.), science can make statements about the people in those professions and the patterns in the conclusions that they reach. If art experts are evaluating paintings differently depending on whether they think the paintings come from an art gallery or a 4-year-old's kitchen table, you could find that out through a scientific experiment. If judges are giving an easier time to lawyers than they are to parties who represent themselves, even when they make exactly identical arguments, you could test that hypothesis with an experiment, too. And scientific principles could be used to draw up procedures for trying cases more objectively, as in the procedure for deciding the legality of sexting photographs. We just need to get over the idea that "scientists" should limit themselves to the forensic CSI stuff and then stay away from the legal arena because that's a "separate domain". Science could tell us quite a lot about how fairly justice is dispensed in the courtroom, and sometimes even how to fix the problems.
Skumanick won't show the pictures to anyone, including the girls' lawyers
hard to prove your innocence if you're not given the chance to.
Sent from your iPad.
In practice, I suspect that the DA just consulted the "Contemporary Community Standards" that he keeps in his pants.
Post the pictures on Digg. The legality of the pictures will be inversely proportional to the number of Pedobear sightings.
a summary that long dedicated to whatever the fuck it is and no actual definition.
at first I thought it might be a "sex sting". turns out it is sending pics of your "naughty bits" via camera phone.
No sig for you!!
The DA is threatening to file felony charges against three girls for taking pictures of themselves. There's no wiggle room; the guy IS an unreasonable buffoon, and excuses like "context syndrome" don't help.
IN some states, the age of consent and child porn statutes have the same age limits.
For instance, a quick read of NV law shows the AOC to be 16. Child porn is defined as sexually explicit blah blah blah involving a person under 16. Federal law makes it a crime with a person under 18, but there may be some state line/interstate commerce nexus that needs to be fulfilled.
I didn't feel like looking at too many states, but found this same AOC/CP thing with NH-16/16.
Many states forbid distributing/exhibiting obscenity to people under 18, regardless of their AOC/CP statutes.
SO, excluding the feds, it's not a crime to have sex with a 16 year old or film it. But, she can't watch the tape afterward. It's a crime to allow her 16 year old friend to watch the act as it occurs, but not a crime to have her join. Neither of them can smoke a cigarette or have a beer afterward. If either one were to rob,beat,kill one of their fellow participants, they would be tried as an adult in every state in the country.
- Stolen from a Fark thread.
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How old do you think your great-great-great grandparents were when the got it on?
It is an interesting idea, and it might even work in theory, but I doubt it will ever be widely used. Why? Because you'll have a hard time convincing people to send possible child pornography off to be examined by a bunch of anonymous experts.
In the case of "sexting," where oftentimes the defendant and the victim are the same person, maybe it would pass. But if Joe Blow is charged with distributing dirty pics of Jenny Junior, I doubt Jenny's parents will be okay with those pictures being shown to even more people. There's no incentive for them to compromise, since people are routinely convicted on child pornography charges without this process.
This whole thing would probably have to be legislated anyway. How many state legislatures, not to mention the US Congress, will be willing to go out on a limb to (it will be said) protect child predators?
The solution to the "sexting" problem is common sense and prosecutorial discretion. Hopefully we'll see more of both!
Just because you sold your soul to the devil that needn't make you a teetotaler. --The Devil and Daniel Webster
No case has yet hit the court and, as such, there are no charges to defend against - only "threatened" charges.
Once the charges are made, the prosecution will be required to furnish the photographs. As it is right now, they may be required not to do so under dissemination laws. This isn't terribly sinister, perhaps simply a stupid law.
...please post some pictures of naked teens watering plants.
... and I ran here. Does that make me a bad person?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
determine whether a picture constitutes child pornography
We don't have a scientific or legal definition for whether a picture constitutes any sort of pornography, other than Oliver Wendel Holmes' "I know it when I see it".
I am officially gone from
Child porn cases can be divided by two dimensions: The photo and the context in which it is possessed.
You can objectively decide the photo: It's either clearly porn, clearly not porn, or in the hopefully-narrow grey area where some local courts or experts applying local community standards would it is and some would say it isn't.
You can objectively decide based on the context: Is this a parent with a childhood photo album that happens to contain half a dozen bathtime pictures, one of which has the child appearing to be masturbating, mixed in with hundreds of non-bathtime pictures? Is this a parent with an album of nothing but bathtime pictures most of which have the child masturbating? Is this an adult with pornographic pictures of himself he inherited from his parents? Is this a teenager with pornographic photos she took of herself? Is this a teenager with pornographic photos his girlfriend let him take? Is this a 30 year old with pornographic pictures of kids he doesn't even know? Is this a 30 year old with pornographic pictures of kids he doesn't even know stored in a locked vault in his office at the FBI, with carefully controlled access to the files in the vault?
Clearly, the FBI is allowed to have such pictures for official use. Clearly, the typical citizen is not allowed to have such pictures of kids that aren't his own without a very good reason, and possessing them is more than likely a sign that the person has criminal tendencies. While not as crystal clear, it's fairly clear that even a parent shouldn't have an album full of such pictures without a very good explaination, for the same reasons. The teenager, teenager's boyfriend, the now-grown child with inherited photos, and mom or dad with a single pornographic "cute kid in bathtub playing with his/her genitals" picture out of many innocent ones are much more likely to result in acquittals or public outcry at overzealous prosecution, even if the picture itself is objectively clearly pornographic. Why? Each of them can claim a moral right to take and/or possess the photos, and each can legitimately claim that possession of the photos is not an indicator that they are a danger to society. In other words, they are very sympathetic defendants.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The concept of picking the illegal photo from a lineup of legal ones is a good one, but it will inevitably lead to a slow migration of the legal standard to an ever more permissive definition of provacative. In order for a photo to be consistently selected from the lineup it would have to be significantly more provacative that the legal ones. Any photos that were only sligthly more provacative would not be identified and would therefore become part of the suite of photos that had been determined to be legal.
It is quite obvious that no underage girl taking pictures of herself---be they pornographic or not---should ever be charged for creating child pornography. The guys who buy the pictures, distribute, or consume them should be charged. People like this judge confuse victims (who might also be victims of their own stupidity or immaturity) with offenders in a rather bizarre way.
This article reminded me of the book "An introduction to general systems thinking" by Gerald Weinberg. Wikipdia has an article on systems thinking.
Was the subject abused or otherwise injured (psychologically or physically) by the photography? After all, child pornography laws are there to protect the children involved. If they took the pictures themselves, it's hard to make a case that they were injured.
It seems to me that if they're old enough to take responsibility for their actions in creating the pictures, and therefore old enough to be punished for them, then they're old enough to have given consent.
Sometimes, a test without context would be appropriate. In other cases, like this one, the context is sufficient to determine innocence without even looking at the pictures.
The article claims it is about childporn, but the story reminds me more of the kind of sexual repression of young people that I normally associate with countries like Iran...
But said pictures are perfectly legal to look at, right? So why stop these *accused* people from using them to make their defence like everyone else?
I dunno, that just seems wrong.
Some of these ideas seem like they would work to ferret out bias in legal proceedings, but mostly this would be because all of the judges and lawyers were too busy participating in scientific evaluations to actually get any (potentially biased) work done. The experiments that he describes (like holding two trials on the same charges for a white guy and a black guy) could take days, and that's just for one judge. To rigorously test the entire judiciary (and I imagine that this would optimally take place periodically), you would probably need almost all of the time of almost all of the judges, not to mention all of the other people that have to participate.
The thing about having a panel review alleged child pornography before charges are pressed wouldn't take that much time, comparatively, but preventing incorrect charges isn't as important as preventing incorrect convictions. IANAL, but isn't that what grand juries are for?
This space reserved for administrative use.
Lawyers and judges do run experiments like you suggest (at least, the good ones do). Judges are generally encouraged to take classes which look at case studies (that is what you are talking about) of types of cases they're commonly trying. There are many social scientists who have made their careers studying how people interact in a court room and whether or not a particular procedure is fair.
Go sit in the audience for a court case. You'll find that lawyers absolutely can not just argue about things. The "case" which a lawyer makes is from evidence and experts, not opinion. They often bring up expert witnesses, and can have whole panels of experts look at evidence and interpret it. The defense lawyers in the case you bring up absolutely will have access to the pictures and will have a panel of experts evaluate them, should this ever go to trial. Anyone who's been on a jury for a DUI has seen how this works, as a good prosecutor will have a medical expert describe how alcohol enters the blood stream, how long it stays there and what the effects are. A good judge would not allow a lawyer to simply assert any of those things.
As a "hard" scientist, I would point out that what you're suggesting is not objective. It's fine to have a science of law, but it is a subjective science. Please don't assume that because someone is "an expert", they are an unfeeling automaton. Any measurement which requires the judgment of a person is subjective.
IAAL
The whole purpose of child pornography laws is to protect the minor victim.
Under the law, a minor child CAN NEVER give consent to a sexual act. Period. There are exceptions for teenagers with other teenagers, but beyond that there is no exception (hence statutory rape laws). The whole point of making child pornography possession illegal is to get around the loophole of "I have a picture of an illegal act, but you can't prosecute me because you do not know who is in the picture."
Now when you actually KNOW who was depicted in the picture, and the circumstances surrounding the picture, you can make a determination as to whether the underlying sexual offense has taken place.
I find it impossible to comprehend the charging of a minor for possession of THEIR OWN PORNOGRAPHY!!! We are now prosecuting the person whom the law was written to PROTECT!!!
The question should not be "is it pornography?" The real question is "was the person who is shown in the photograph illegally exploited?" That is a much simpler question to come to terms with, and by ignoring that question, you make a mockery of the legal system.
Okay, first, you can't "scientifically test" people's sexual mores. It's a question of taste, culture, environment, and context. Second, the definition of pornography has long been held to be something along the lines of "You'll know it when you see it." This has actually been used as the legal test in many courts in this country. Third, people are stupid frothing-at-the-mouth retarded and lobotomized flatworms as soon as they become emotionally engaged in a social problem, and doubly-so when it involves criminal charges.
The legal system is a crap shoot. As a defendant you can be hung even if you make completely honest statements. False witnesses, poor quality of evidence, lack of evidence, or (god help you) eyewitness testimony, etc., can all destroy the credibility of a defendant who is completely honest on the stand. If you excercise your fifth amendment rights, the jury will pretty much hang you on that basis alone -- nevermind the VERY strong legal arguments for doing so (even if you're innocent). Not only that, but did you know that in something like a quarter of rape cases where the defendant was later aquitted based on DNA evidence -- they admitted to the crime? Not that YOU would ever do something like that, but why do you suppose they did it? And let's not even get into over-zealous prosecutors, incompetent judges and attorneys, "lost" or witheld evidence from the police department--because we all know they aren't human but in fact infallable robots who never make honest mistakes, let alone malicious ones. Did I mention that a lot of people plead guilty to lesser offenses simply because they don't want to deal with the hassle and stress of a trial? A lot of people do this. Think of when you got a parking ticket or speeding ticket -- after venting about how you're going to fight the man, etc., and how the cop was just singling you out, etc... How many of you knew you weren't guilty but decided to give in anyway and pay the fine just because it was easier than a fight and the risk of losing and having to pay even more (and pay you will, Citizen).
In the majority of cases, the trial is over before it even starts. And people don't learn -- it doesn't matter how many innocents they throw to the wolves, because in their mind they're justified for doing so "because we got a few bad guys doing it too!" People are irrational, emotional, slathering rat-beasts. And they're stupid. Just realize how stupid the average person is and then realize that half the people serving on your jury will be stupider than that. Oh, and the icing on the cake? I don't know you, but I'm sure you've committed an arrestable-offense today. There is no person on the planet who can understand and follow all the laws we've created. And there are so many of them, that the odds are incredibly good that you've broken at least one of them. So all of you are criminals. We just haven't caught you...yet.
Lastly, consider this: What if one of these girls had been a boy instead. Ah, but justice is blind they say.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I think it's more disturbing that you think females past the age of puberty are somehow not sexual beings and that having a sexual interest is somehow unnatural and wrong.
Sounds good, but the viewers would eventually recognize the "provocative but legal" photos as that pool of photos would 1) probably not be so large as to avoid frequent duplication, and 2) become notorious and publicized and be rendered ineffective for this purpose.
Perhaps a comparison of of written descriptions of the photo content versus written descriptions of "provocative but legal" photos? The description would be written by both the prosecution and defense and the final edit would belong to a judge other than the presiding judge, but not one whose sole job is to review descriptions.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
email them here, daddy@gmailer.com and I'll take a look. ;)
How old are these girls? 16?
I wouldn't become involved with them in person. I also do not recommend that they take erotic photos of themselves.
On the other hand, I bet they don't actually look like children.
When you roam the Intertubes as long as CmdrTaco has you have a need to broaden your horizons beyond just your usual mainstream pr0n.
If the people in the picture are younger than the age at which they can legally consent to having that picture taken, then that picture is illegal. If it's a picture of sex or nudity, then it's child pornography.
It's an easy question if the law protects the subject of the picture. Protects them from the original event, where they're having sex or being naked in a way that exploits them. And protects them from the damage to their reputation and self image that distribution of the picture does. Easy question, simply the age and pose of the subject.
If you're making a law that punishes sinners for lusting after a child, then it's a hard question. You've got to make the law prohibit depictions of children who don't exist, like in comic books. You've got to prohibit pictures of adults (un)dressed like children. And probably all kinds of other things, chasing the perversion in the minds of perverts, notoriously non-uniform in what's in their minds to prohibit.
That kind of question should be hard, because it's a waste of time. The government's business isn't policing sin, but protecting children. That legit business is mercifully much easier, while still hard enough that it needs to be done by professionals when parents fail.
--
make install -not war
No, I was also disturbed.
What children? The article is about teenagers.
I doubt it. The social stuff has way too many variables, both known and unknown, and the experiments, if any, are constrained by the expense and ethical constraints.
"Hard science" has built up much credibility capital for the therm "scientific", painfully and slowly, and using the term willy-nilly like this will destroy it pretty quick.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Is this guy actually trying to get kiddie porn laws overturned, by using them in the most ludicrous manner imaginable?
It seems to me that this guy's actions just highlight how insane some of our current laws against victimless crimes really are, by showing the ways in which they can be abused.
To quote myself. Bet he never got a single valentine from his girlfriend containing a nude Polaroid of herself.
or it didn't happen...
Can all fish swim?
Either this or have them overly sexualized.
As it seems, it's hard to have a neutral view about these matters. At least it is when it gets to media.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
We are the priests, of the temples of syrinx
Is it hot? Then it's bad!
This really ain't news, and no one should be concerned. If someone takes naked pictures of themselves, thats their business.
Lets stop being hyped up over enforcing stupid codes in this country we don't believe in. DOWN with the global elite megatards.
Kiddie porn laws, in which an inanimate photo is placed on trial, are equally ludicrous on their face.
They may have some value as a prosecutorial tool if they convince a jury that a defendant is guilty of a real crime. But in those cases, no scientific evidence is necessary. A carefully-preserved collection of old Coppertone adsin the possession of an accused molester could strengthen a case without requiring that they be adjudged pornographic.
It's just you. You must be new here, Welcome to the Internets.
The problem with this approach is that the public will have knowledge of your proposed screening procedure. The prosecutor can use whatever tools he desires to help him determine which cases he should prosecute and which he shouldn't. However, if the public knew that the prosecutor was only going after those whose pictures had been identified by "legal experts" to be objectionable, the potential for undue influence on the jury would be incredible. Simply put, if someone is prosecuted, the jury may assume the illegality of the photo is a foregone conclusion. That would result in serious prejudice to any defendant, effectively replacing the role of the jury with that of the prosecutor's methodology.
What is this some kind of forbidden topic that you can't joke about?
The only issue I see (apart from the inevitable so-called moral objections) is that if all pictures that are "deemed legal" by such a lineup process are then able to be used to test the legality of others, such a system is prone to slippage over time, due to the accumulation of tiny differences. If the first set of "approved pictures" are entirely non-raunchy, then over time some very-slightly-raunchy pictures will be compared to these, and deemed legal. As defense lawyers are always likely to choose the "most extreme" pictures possible, to bolster their client's chances, these will be used almost exclusively to test future cases, until some slighly-raunchy pictures are approved, and so on.
One partial solution would be a periodic review that has the unenviable job of looking over all pictures approved by this process, and the authority to say whether or not they can be used as "test pieces" in future line-ups. Even that would only slow the rate of slippage, not halt it altogether.
Another useful feature might be random selection of pictures, or even better computer selection, whereby pictures will be selected based on similarity to the "offending" image - but I appreciate thats got no chance of receiving endorsement.
Perhaps someone can think of a better method that is still roughly scientific,
Yupp. Don't make thinking illegal.
This is part of the whole "victimless crime" item, except that in the vast majority of cases, you can not even establish probable danger.
If I am speeding on a safe, empty road, I'm not really putting anyone at risk except me, but you could argue that there might be a child hiding at the precise tree I'll be slamming into, or someone somehow gets in front of me without me noticing quick enough - etc. Short version: While in that actual situation nobody might have been harmed, a small modification of the situation creates plausible danger, hence you could argue my speeding needs to be punished.
Now try to extend that to someone looking at cartoon characters fucking. Uh, wait, seemingly underage cartoon characters (whatever that means) fucking. I challenge you. Which small modification of the situation causes harm or puts someone at risk?
There's no risk here. Not even a theoretical one. AFAIK the often provided "looking at drawings that look like a 12 year old doing naughty things causes children to be harmed for more porn production" line has no scientific evidence for it whatsoever. In fact, all evidence we do have suggests that the more you suppress sexual desires, the stronger they will erupt when the barrier falls.
Quite honestly, my personal belief is that these kiddie-porn-crusaders are probably causing more actual damage to children than the vast majority of those who enjoy sexy cartoons.
In the end, though, this is a lost cause. Evidence, truth and justice are not on the agenda of 99.99% of the people involved. Just look at the lineup. Politicians, lawyers, policemen. All people who stand to profit from more laws, more complicated laws, broader laws and more difficult to decide legal cases.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Don't get me wrong - I abhor and loathe pedophiles, however, it seems that these stories always refer to finding things in a pedophile's basement. Is there some unwritten (or written) agreement between all pedophiles that requires they keep their collections in the basement?
this is madness.... damn...world is going towards a very deep abyss.... but everyone with these crazy morals and fucked up ethics will be the first to have their twisted head chopped in the next huge civil war... how can a pic of myself, no matter what age, taken by myself and 'used' by myself be of ANY concern to the law?? Police State, that's the answer.
Perhaps by having two actors in different courtrooms on the same day, charged with exactly the same crime under the same circumstances, except one is black and the other is white, and repeat the experiment many times to see if they receive different average sentences. For a scientist, the idea is the most natural thing in the world. Forget the fact that the legal system doesn't do this -- why is virtually nobody in the legal profession even suggesting it?
Nobody is suggesting it because the legal system operates on the premise that judges are impartial and unbiased.
The Western system of justice functions because the courts and their decisions are respected. To suggest (God forbid you actually show) otherwise is to damage the court's effectiveness... which is why studies showing that minorities receive harsher sentences are rarely popular.
There are always 'inconvenient truths' that must either be rhetorically obfuscated or avoided entirely. And with the proliferation of bias *studies, it is harder and harder to make the claim that individuals (Judges, Prosecutors, Police) are unbiased, because studies keep showing that even 'unbiased' individuals have unconscious biases.
Implicit Bias among Physicians ... Black and White Patients
Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees (3rd one down)
Check your own biases using Harvard's IAT tests
*and corresponding studies looking at ways to practically apply the results of such bias studies
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Well, *I* for one, welcome our new obtuse and irrelevant opinion-writing overlord!
My blog
Currently we are going through a period of almost obsessive prurience - like the time of the Salem Witch Trials. We will doubtless emerge. The law needs to evolve because it reflects the norms of society.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The whole point of making child pornography possession illegal is to get around the loophole of "I have a picture of an illegal act, but you can't prosecute me because you do not know who is in the picture."
It's more than that.
If a child or underage teen photographs herself masturbating then shares it with her boyfriend who then releases it to the world without permission, there is no underlying statutory rape or underlying crime of sexual performance of a child. Yet, possessing the photo is still illegal.
The same goes if a child or teenager masturbates or has legal sex in a parking garage stairwell and unknown to them they are caught on camera, and the person reviewing the tape uploads it to the Internet for all to see. There's no underlying criminal sex act, save perhaps sex in a public place, and viewing and keeping the original tape might even be legal depending on the state's safe-harbor laws, but distributing the video is clearly illegal, as it should be.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Hopefully you're the only one, since it's a joke. Something this idiotic subject badly needs.
As people's brains cease to function when discussing child porn, I'll now state the obvious. You're not supposed to give offhand jokes serious consideration. It's like reading Alice in Wonderland as if it were an encylopaedia. It's not disturbing because it doesn't reflect any real behaviour or thought. There are various words describing the practise: stupidity, foolishness, idiocy, straw-man...
Play Ball!
Don't forget that they will very likely be tried as adults because they were fully capable of understanding the nature and consequences of their actions for something that is only illegal because they are NOT capable of doing exactly that.
That's not why child porn is illegal. It can't be.
Consider: I'm (significantly) over 18 years of age, so the law assumes I understand the consequences of my actions. That includes knowing the consequences of distributing pornographic images of myself, which I have the legal right to do.
Hypothetically, let's say that before I turned 18 and instantly became aware of the consequences of my actions, I took some photographs of myself masturbating, but never distributed them. It would be patently illegal for me to distribute (or even possess them) them now, despite my being well over the age of majority, because it would be child pornography.
If the child porn laws were merely about protecting those who don't understand the consequences of their actions, it would be legal for me to distribute those photos at the present time, because I am deemed (at present), to understand the consequences of my actions, and am in no need of such protection.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
It's hard to avoid thinking that this case looks a bit like the Salem Witch Trials, but recurring as farce rather than tragedy. Since Classical Athens, there have always been societies that have an undercurrent of gynophobia and repression of women in general. Rather than apply this proposed test, at vast expense, what we need is for all legal staff involved in the prosecution of cases where there is a sexual element to undergo psychiatric screening to ensure that their desire to prosecute women and girls isn't, itself, a sexual perversion.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I tested this on the net, mainly to troll but also for curiosity. I went to 4chan and posted a picture of a young girl taking a bath. You could only see the face since there was soap everywhere. I followed by posting a picture of a nude family walking on the beach and was permanently banned in the following minute. So I stopped my experiment right there. If /b is disturbed, imagine how the rest of the world would react...
I can confidently conclude that nudity equals child porn now, so I'm not surprised by this trial at all. This is what society wants.
Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it disturbing that CmdrTaco put "I-like-the-testing-part" and described the story as "the sextiest" when the subject is about children taking nude pictures of themselves, and testing to see if they are child pornography?
There were no children involved in this case. There were adolescents well past the age at which people in Western societies routinely engage in voluntary sexual behaviour. Of course adolescent girls experiment with how to attract and interact with potential sexual partners. That's a natural, inevitable and healthy part of growing up. The fact that, given ubiquitous camera phones, they're now using camera phones as part of this behaviour may be new, but its also inevitable.
Seriously, if this Attorney has a problem with these girls sharing these photographs voluntarily with their boyfriends (as opposed to broadcasting them across the web, for example) one has to start asking whether the Attorney has not got an altogether unhealthy interest in adolescent sexuality.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I guess you'd also be disturbed, then, that I didn't actually notice the subheadline but had the same response when reading the article?
The following quotation comes immediately to mind. It was uttered by Cary Grant's character in the movie Operation Petticoat:
...and it's hard to get one of those if you're force to admit that no crime has been committed.
"A naive solution, from a scientific point of view, would be to poll a random sample of lawyers or other professionals in a police go-to database, and ask them to evaluate whether the picture is child pornography, without any information about where the picture came from."
So, in essence you would be purposefully distributing child porn to a random sample of people. That would solve the problem!
I love how someone made a law and suddenly 16 and 8 year old girls are morally equivalent when it comes to sex.
Biologically, we are completely ready to start having sex by 13-14 at the latest, and our bodies start wanting to. There is very little physical distinction between a picture of an attractive 15 year old and an attractive 18 year old. It is not sick to want to fuck 16 year olds - we have, in fact, been doing it for our entire history. You used to be married by then.
It may be a bad idea, with young women and men being unable to deal with the responsibilities and consequences that come with sex. But it isn't unnatural.
I'm all for protecting children, but 16 year olds are only children because we decided to force them to be. It isn't this new culture that is sexualizing teens. It's our nature revolting against the unnaturally long childhood that middle class wealth has allowed us to force on ourselves. We evolved to be out learning to be an adult and getting ready to start a family by that age, not sitting in class and pretending to be asexual until we get married at 22.
Is the nude teenager covered in hot grits? If yes = child pornography.
He knows that it is porn because it made his dick hard.
He is therefore, a closet pedophile and should not be in a position where he can acquire such pictures for his personal collection.
What say we send the van to his house tonight?
From what I understand, minors are tried as adults in many cases because, assuming they committed the crime of which they're accused, they've taken on "adult" responsibilities by [allegedly] committing an "adult" action and should be treated as such.
Is not sex one of those actions?
I mean, I know people are becoming sexually active at younger ages (compared to the few previous generations, but certainly not humanity as a whole) but if sex is something that our laws deem fit to be an action that is defined as an adult choice, why are sexually active minors only treated like adults when their actions are considered criminal? Why is it that discovering self-made sex videos or pictures of consenting minors suddenly means that we have to treat and try them as adults, whereas the same minors would require a parent's signature to get an abortion?
I'm not one to think that everyone should be treated like an adult, but there are some things that even kids understand are adult choices. They may not realize the full consequences of their actions, but on the same token, when I was younger I always knew when I "done fucked up." I may not have known how to handle it, but I certainly knew I'd be held responsible...
Part of becoming an adult is the process of making adult decisions (read: mistakes) and adjusting to the consequences of screwing up, and those who survive long enough generally become healthy adults, but when the consequences for something as commonplace, enjoyable, and desirable as sex are FEDERAL CRIMINAL CHARGES, chances are good the only lesson you'll learn from your teenage foray into your sexuality is that society believes you are one fucked up individual... and you'll probably be one until you die.
It's sad that the heartbreak, embarrassment, emotional distress, STD-acquisition potential, and general insecurity that having sex at the wrong time or with the wrong person can give you isn't enough for some people... we really need to throw criminal charges on top of it.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
There is information, and then there is stuff. Stuff is generally considered as physical objects, though can more precisely be defined as something that cannot be perfectly copied (the text of a book is information, and the book itself is stuff).
Making laws against possession of information is dangerous.
In my opinion, only actions should be outlawed. Then situations like this, where judges attempt to use their position to settle their own moral dilemmas would not happen. Are there any signs of child abuse? Of course not.
Well, clearly, yes. Although a small clarification is in order. Something that is provocative need not be intended to provoke a violent response. And in the context of porn/ertoica/what-have-you "provocative" is generally understood as intended to provoke a sexual response. So I don't think it's entirely fair to label the GP as "stupid" on that basis.
In the general case, no, But (sticking with violence) there are a wide range of passive aggresive behaviours that are intended to provoke a violent response, whilst remaining uperficially innocuous. So even in the relatively clear cut case of violence, there are subtle provocations that might be difficult to categorise.
I think the point was more that it is difficult to categorise many pictures into those which may be legally considered as provocative, and those which may not. The problem is not recognising provocation as such - it is finding a consistent standard for provocation that isn't largely personal to the tastes and beliefs of local law enforcement officials.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
IANAL and perhaps I watch too much Law & Order but...
Would it not be possible for the defense attorney to request a Grand Jury hearing to determine if the DA has sufficient evidence to warrant the charges?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it disturbing that CmdrTaco put "I-like-the-testing-part" and described the story as "the sextiest" when the subject is about children taking nude pictures of themselves, and testing to see if they are child pornography?
I think it's more disturbing that you think females past the age of puberty are somehow not sexual beings and that having a sexual interest is somehow unnatural and wrong.
I think it's more disturbing that you think the GP thinks females past the age of puberty are somehow not sexual beings and that having a sexual interest is somehow unnatural and wrong. Seriously, how did you get all that from "the subject is about children taking nude pictures of themselves"?
I don't believe that's the situation here. If they kept possession of the images in question, I doubt the DA would have even found out. It seems the images were distributed to other kids in the school, and were found on some third party's confiscated phone.
What this means for the legal case, I'm not competent to judge. It doesn't change at all the fact that prosecution for this is ludicrous. The intent of the law is clearly to PROTECT children from those who'd prey upon them... not ruin their lives.
I have been reading about cases like this for some time now and it really is beyond me how they can be perverted by the prosecutors up to "child pornography"
Their arguments are quite far fetched and overstress the fact that these are pictures of minors but seem to totally overlook a very simple fact that there is no pornography about them whatsoever.
To demonstrate my point simply: Suppose an adult woman takes a very provocative nude picture of herself and mails it to her equaly adult boyfriend, to spice things up in their relationship. Would anyone at that point characterize the photo as pornographic ? Certainly not.
Now suppose that this man, for whatever reason, be it of spite or idiocy, decides to reprint the photo and share it with a couple of friends, either to brag or to ridicule the afformentioned woman, the reason is irrelevant. At this point, would the photo be considered pornographic ? Certainly not. It might tip a morality scale, however noone would think "pornography" at this point,
Suppose now, that the man having received the praises of his friends about the contents of the photo and being of entrepreneurial spirit, decides to put the photo on the internet, place a few ads and charge 10 cents for anyone to see. Now, I think that that is the point where the photo would start being labeled as pornographic.
It is clear to me that the term "pornographic" encompasses invariably an intent of profit or at least some form of exploitation by the publisher of the photo for personal gain. None of the cases that were pursued by the authorities mentioned any sort of such intent, either by the minors on the pictures or by the ones that possessed copies of the photos.
There is a lot to be said about a society that produces young teenagers to take lewd pictures of themselves and send them to friends. But that is besides the point. I think there is a more, much more, to be said about a society that produces prosecutors who can simply not tell the difference between silly teenage behaviour and something as vile as child pornography.
You do realize that girls above the age of puberty are supposed to be sexually attractive, right? That's how nature gets us to reproduce -- you hit puberty and start to become sexually capable and your body starts to look it as well.
Holding off on your urges and being polite and treating girls with respect has nothing to do with the internal reality that you should probably find a sexually mature person of your gender of preference sexually appealing (yeah that's a lot of political correctness for one sentence).
I'm sick of society's bent notion that finding attractive girls attractive is wrong. We use them for models and put them on magazine covers and use them to sell make-up, but its totally wrong to see them as sexual beings? Give me a break.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
With a name like Cmdr-taco, people tend to take you seriously.
The prosecutor doesn't want to be painted as soft, especially where minors are involved ... the law and common sense be damned. He's got a political future to think about.
Just make ALL speech legal. That takes care of this bullshit. You can't be prosecuted for telling someone something. Period.
And if you think there must be a line somewhere ("Fire" in a crowded theater), forget it. ALL speech should be legal.
Treason? Defamation? Child porn? Top secret leaks? Incitement to riot? ALL should be legal. As long as everyone KNOWS it's legal, it works out fine.
Will it make people safer? NO! It will make things more dangerous. But at least we'll be safer from the government which, since it owns infinite power, is a much bigger enemy than any schmuck on a street corner.
They aren't actually nude, they are wearing bras.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
One key part of modern line-ups is to create a situation where it's possible that the suspect isn't even among the line-up. Either by having the victim look at photographs one by one, without getting to go back, or at least using a nearly neverending source of photos, so they can't simply pick the best match from a group of five or six. For the child porn version, this would basically amount to sending everyone on the go-to list one picture per day (or week or month, depending on how big your decidedly-legal corpus is), and asking them to evaluate it. On days when you have a suspected photograph, you send a subset of the list the suspected pic. On other days, you send everyone a known-legal. Then you get false-alarm rates for each person on the list, which will strengthen/weaken their results appropriately.
After all, this is the country - 'The land of the free' *chuckle* - that had an 11-year-old boy chained and dragged out of his home for putting his little girl on the pott. The case cause an outrage in the western world, and rightfully so.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It doesn't matter if the photo you received is a 50-year-old Valerie Bertinelli, a 16-year-old Miley Cyrus, or a 6-year-old Elle Fanning. The naked human body is not a crime. It is God's masterpiece. It is Natural, not sinful.
The only time a crime has been committed is if the photo shows penetration or oral gratification, and only if the person is younger than 18, since minors are not allowed to have sex.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Law enforcement routinely takes your state of mind into account when it prosecutes.
There are some situations in which an otherwise-illegal activity should not be outlawed or the laws should not be enforced.
Firing a bullet into your brain is generally illegal, but if you have a gun pointed at me and I think you are going to kill me, self defense means it's not a crime and it would be silly to prosecute.
Likewise, possession by professionals, possession of pictures of yourself, "reasonable" numbers of otherwise-illegal pictures of ones children, reasonable numbers of photos one inherits from someone legally possessing the photos, possession without knowledge of content e.g. you bought a used computer where the drive wasn't wiped, involuntary possession without a reasonable opportunity to destroy e.g. received in email 2 seconds ago, and many other reasons should come under safe-harbor laws. Some of these safe harbors, such as professional use or "no more than 3 photos" in a family photo album, are built into the statutes. Others are left to prosecutorial discretion. Personally, I'd like to see liberal safe-harbor laws in the statutes so parents who aren't deliberately going out of their way to produce or disseminate child porn aren't at the mercy of a blue-nosed prosecutor. On the other hand, I have little sympathy for parents who make their child pose for pornographic photographs they intend on selling or trading with other parents.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
about children taking nude pictures of themselves
Not really. What I find disturbing is that you apparently missed the point that the pictures were not nude, nor do they have to be nude to be considered child porn.
Additionally, I find it disturbing that you would find a person who is biologically and adult & fully capable of reproduction to be a "child". They are not children. They may indeed be minors legally, but that is very different from being a child. They are adults in every sense except for how the law is written.
The most disturbing part is that taking a picture of yourself can get you sent to jail & labeled as a sex offender for the rest of your life.
it's overdeveloped children...
Simple reason : the law don't take into account that you may not willingly watch that stuff. Posession and watching without context is forbidden ! Example : I send you a MMS. I name it "EXCLUSIVE new picture of the US flag !" or whatever. But the content is child porn or whatever can be construed as it. You open the MMS. You watch it. You broke the law even if unwillingly.
I said Child Porn should be legal. Of course using a child for making child porn should remain illegal. But the porn itself should carry no penalties.
A picture can (and should) still be used as evidence of a crime, but that crime better have a victim and a (different) perpetrator or it's not a crime. As evidence, it should be distributable.
Whether or not you believer that child pornography is used by the politicians to manipulate the masses, the parent is right about the wrong thing being persecuted. While one could argue the those who look at CP might hve a higher disposition towards exploiting children (and I have yet to see a scientific study that actually proves it - even ideas that sound obvious might be wrong), going after and demonizing those people is neither going to effectively protect children from being molested, nor is it going to keep the producers from making and selling the stuff. In both cases I (like the parent) point to drugs, where the same thing does absolutely nothing.
Especially bad is that people even remotely suspect of having such pictures on their computer are immediately dehumanized by the media while the same is not true for the producers. When was the last time you've seen the media do a big story about a man who produced CP? And when was the last time yo've seen the same for a CP "consumer"? Whatever the prosecutors do, the media couldn't care less about the manufacturers. They are merely a number to be used with the phrase "child pornography ring". But God help you if someone suspects you have a picture of a naked underage girl on your mobile - literally. Because anything short of divine intervention won't help against the massive loss of reputation the media are going to inflict on you.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Why are you so stuck with this morality in the first place?
You might ask the same question of Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton, editor CmdrTaco, and the people who wrote the 225-and-counting replies. I think I can answer for most when I say civil liberties issues sell on slashdot, and sex sells everywhere. Ever wondered why when there is a sexual assault that gets on the TV news it usually leads? Ever wonder why Slashdot has its own civil-liberties category?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
An average 8 year old has an adult IQ half of his rated IQ, i.e. about 50 give or take.
Any adult with an IQ of 50 would probably be deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial.
Now, if you have an 8 year old genius with an IQ if 200 and by some fluke of brain development a maturity and decision-making ability to match, i.e. he's mentally and emotionally a 16-year-old, then I can see trying him as an adult. But be real, how many super-bright, super-mature 8 year olds commit felonies?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How about changing the title tag to "news for pedos and porn addled assholes." Then they could focus 100% on writing articles on how to encrypt your child-porn collection, how to hide your browsing history from your mom, jack-off tips, how to make any woman so uncomfortable by commenting on her body and threatening to rape her that she'd rather die in a fire than be a computer scientist, how to force 12-year-olds to send you porn of themselves, how to avoid getting caught by TV's "To catch a pervert," how to use Facebook to blackmail boys into giving you blowjobs, etc. etc. It's already pretty indistinguishable from boingboing, might as well go all the way.
The issue at hand here is really one of authorial intentionality. Clearly, the judge thinks the pictures were intended to be provocative and pornographic in nature, but, on the off-chance they were meant in good, semi-clean fun, can the judge really punish the kids for his interpretation of the pictures?
The other side of the coin is that the girls clearly showed bad judgment in taking these pictures and sending them around, and there should be some appropriate form of punishment for their choices. Maybe the threat of child porn charges (without any intent to follow through on them) is a good idea.
Having worked at a high school and a middle school, I hope that this is teaching a lesson to kids, but the reality is probably that they have no idea about this or that they just don't care anyway.
Where did he say that? Being put off by Taco's treatment of the topic is not quite the same as denying sexual-being-dom to someone.
Art has to be evaluated in context! Campbell's Soup Can anyone?
Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go round.
If the people in the picture are younger than the age at which they can legally consent to having that picture taken, then that picture is illegal. If it's a picture of sex or nudity [emphasis added], then it's child pornography.
There are several world-famous, or perhaps world-infamous in some circles, artists who specialize in nude children. Many parents, at least many who were parents of the 1960s and 1970s, have at least one picture of their child in the buff. I assume some nudists' family photos are in the buff too.
It's been ruled time and time again in the United States that mere nudity does not constitute pornography. Even sex in some circumstances, such as adults copulating in a scientific film, would not constitute pornography and it would be legal to sell the resulting video to people under 17. Something to consider about non-porn sex films: Soliciting sexual performance of a child is a crime in most or all states independent of whether it is filmed or whether the resulting film is pornographic.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Your claim of morality notwithstanding, it's currently illegal in most or all states for someone underage to send a pornographic image of herself to her boyfriend.
Whether it should be or not is a matter for public debate. The fact is, until the courts or lawmakers say otherwise, it is illegal.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... then, yes, this is a scientific test indeed.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Then they could focus 100% on writing articles...
Click here.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Where does the law come into play where naked baby or toddler pictures are concerned? I think there has to be a difference in the law between a sexually explicit picture and picture of a kid that was just born or even a 2 year old.
How about if the girls in the pictures don't want to press charges then the DA isn't allowed to. The problem here is an over zealous DA trying to defend the "written law" for its own sake rather than someone who has been victimized trying to get justice.
-Xen
It's a shame that such a well thought-out piece is written by someone who either doesn't edit, or doesn't have a firm grasp of the English language.
And by "scientific", I mean that the Yes/No answers returned by the procedure should be repeatable as far as possible, so that different defendants aren't being tried under wildly different standards, where Bob is convicted of possessing an innocuous photo while Alice is acquitted even though she possessed a racier one.
(emphasis added)
Innocuous means harmless... so how can Bob be convicted of possesing a harmless photo?
Perhaps you meant to say "Bob was convicted of possession despite the photo being innocuous" or something like that.
Can anyone honestly tell me why a child needs a cellphone? While I love my kids, they all know they aren't important enough to need one. Hell, I'm not even important enough to need a cellphone.
This sort of trial has me thinking that the US really have a problem with sex. This is a natural thing that humans (and other living creatures) do.
From one of your own links: "Under Pennsylvania's child pornography law, it's a felony to possess or disseminate photos of a minor engaged in sexual activity, "lewd exhibition of the genitals," or nudity that is meant to titillate. Open lewdness, a misdemeanor, includes any lewd act that is likely to be observed by others." [my emphasis]
It seems that a large chunk of your overlong article is based on a wrong premise as to what is the relevant law. Which only goes to show that you did not research the relevant law.
How generous of you to give him credit for meeting a legal definition that doesn't apply to this case.
Anyway, your talk about "context syndrome" entails that you'd forbid the DA from considering the contexts in which the picture was created and distributed in deciding whether a child pornography or open lewdness offence was perpretrated. "Child pornography" is a property of photos, and a photo is either CP or not on its own merits, irrelevant of how it was taken, and what was done with it afterwards. That assumption permeates your whole analysis and proposal.
The problem is that, under your approach, if I was a child abuser abusing the towel photo girl, made her pose for that photo, distributed it to other people under the understanding that these are sexually titillating photos of minors, and hell, got paid for it too, you seem to want to drop all of this context from consideration as to whether I and the people that I sold photos to should be convicted under child pornography charges.
More generally, there are plenty of pictures of minors that, taken individually, could be created under either completely innocent circumstances or sexually abusive ones, but taken in the context of their creation and distribution, must count as child porn. The best example of this is photo series of clothed pre-pubescent girls in spread-legged poses that emphasize the girls' groins, taken by commercial photographers and sold over web sites dedicated to this kind of photo series, and that really go out of their way to say they are about "modeling" and "art," and not about porn. This kind of thing has been found in the past to be child pornography; however, if we take any one photo in isolation, and strip all of the context away from it, the photo may be read as just depicting a young girl in an unknowingly immodest pose, taken perhaps by a relative. Or in other words: there are cases of child pornography that you can't catch without bringing context in.
And at any rate, the problem with these prosecutions seems to be a failure to give due weight to context. The whole point of child pornography laws is to protect minors from sexual predation; child pornography is a visual record of child sexual abuse (note how context-bound that is), and its creation and dissemination perpetuates the sexual abuse of the victim. Then the best argument that the girls are innocent of creating and disseminating child pornography is contextual: they didn't abuse anybody! Your standards, however, would deprive us of that argument, and we'd be reduced to having a panel of random folks be shown a picture of a 17 year old girl, rig
Are you adequate?
Unfortunately, while in search of news, the media can trample a person's reputation so that a large percentage of viewers 'know' that a person is 'guilty'. The media seems to forget that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty, at least in the United States.
There were times during the OJ Simpson trial in the 90's that I wondered if anybody remembered that fact of law. Guilty or not, he was being 'convicted' by the media. I sometimes wonder if the 'not guilty' verdict was partially a reaction to the media 'conviction', in addition to the other problems with the trial.
Pics, or it never happened.
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
While the suggestions are interesting, They seem overwrought. Why not simply pose an adult similarly to the picture and then ask the question: is this pornography? Combine that answer with the age of the true subject and voila. Thus, you get around the necessity of building databases of images of questionable material or distributing an image of dubious legality.
Don't forget that they will very likely be tried as adults because they were fully capable of understanding the nature and consequences of their actions for something that is only illegal because they are NOT capable of doing exactly that.
That's not why child porn is illegal. It can't be.
Consider: I'm (significantly) over 18 years of age, so the law assumes I understand the consequences of my actions. That includes knowing the consequences of distributing pornographic images of myself, which I have the legal right to do.
Hypothetically, let's say that before I turned 18 and instantly became aware of the consequences of my actions, I took some photographs of myself masturbating, but never distributed them. It would be patently illegal for me to distribute (or even possess them) them now, despite my being well over the age of majority, because it would be child pornography.
If the child porn laws were merely about protecting those who don't understand the consequences of their actions, it would be legal for me to distribute those photos at the present time, because I am deemed (at present), to understand the consequences of my actions, and am in no need of such protection.
You have a flaw in your argument: circular logic. You can't claim it's illegal because it's illegal. Producing child porn is illegal because it (presumably) harms the child.
If you have nekid pictures of you stroking yourself when you were twelve, and now you're 24. Then you aren't harming yourself if you decide that you're willing to distribute them.
A person perving over kiddy pictures does not a molester make.
Of course, this is all going down in the same society that has effectively outlawed attempted suicide.
Now imagine you have pictures of being a little kid bathing (for extra fun: with your siblings). Showing those to your boy/girlfriend will get you convicted for owning and making available images of naked kids! Who would want to defend you despicable being for having those images around!
And the scary thing: If things continue in the direction they are going now, it is only a matter of time.
post a risque image of Potter Stewart.
You do realize that girls above the age of puberty are supposed to be sexually attractive, right?
Exactly. I'd go so far to say that if an adult male doesn't find post-pubescent girls attractive then he's probably attracted to boys.
Under Pennsylvania's child pornography law, it's a felony to possess or disseminate photos of a minor engaged in sexual activity, "lewd exhibition of the genitals," or nudity that is meant to titillate.
(emphasis mine).
Seems like that last point leaves the judge plenty of leeway to me.
semantics are everything!
Perhaps I am being paranoid but this is smelling like the new McArthyism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism A convenient way to make someone you don't like look bad. Exploiting children is very bad but just is bad is falsely accusing someone of this to make yourself look like a hero or to punish someone you don't like.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
Where are the interviews with the children? Where is their say in this situation? After all, they are the victims of their own crime, right?
This is a wonderful example of parenting being done to children, not with children. Adults are freaking out of control and exercising their power to dominate the children's lives without a real need apart from the adult's emotional insecurity.
I wonder how are the girls and their classmates feeling after their private lives were taken into the spotlight? Their childish (not very well thought out) actions judged and classified as child pornography acts?
Yes, maybe it is not direct sexual abuse. But how does the violation of their privacy feel? And yes obviously they took these photos and distributed them themselves... not to their teachers / principle, though.
How can we be sure that at least one of the adults involved is not secretly getting sexual / emotional gratification from the photos AND the emotional violation/domination, safely hiding behind the facade of "caring for the children?"
What do the children have to say about this? If the goal of this investigation is to protect children from abuse then let's talk to the children involved and find out if they feel better and safer after the investigation.
If this is not the case, then maybe the investigation is catering to a different agenda.
So this guy is rounding up pictures of underage girls in explicit photos? Sounds like maybe he needs to be investigated for child porn. Maybe he should be prosecuted for simply seeing the explicit material. No need to worry about the context of why he saw the images, just that he did see them should be more than enough for a charge. Lock him up.
Here's the problem: The sex offender laws were created to protect against predators. If this chain of logic is followed - then - it is perceivable *anyone* can become a sex offender under the age of 18. The net effect - this waters down the use of the law, and now you have people who you're intending to protect which are suddenly being included in the predator population. So what's the use of having the law, if it does not differentiate personal choice versus what is predatory and what is not. It's no different than an adult choosing to do the same thing, but if it is an adult initiating these actions by all means they deserve to have this label placed on them.
"And on the flip side, what about using scientific methods to examine facts about the legal system? When considering that judges are tasked with evaluating parties' claims in an objective and fair manner, one could ask: Are they really being objective? What are different ways that we could test this? Perhaps by having two actors in different courtrooms on the same day, charged with exactly the same crime under the same circumstances, except one is black and the other is white, and repeat the experiment many times to see if they receive different average sentences. For a scientist, the idea is the most natural thing in the world. Forget the fact that the legal system doesn't do this -- why is virtually nobody in the legal profession even suggesting it?"
I recall hearing, in a non-class setting while I was in Salt Lake City, Utah, that just this type of testing is done at random, like the Secret shopper all retail workers are so familiar with.
Why don't those suggestions ever come from within the legal profession itself?
The criminal law industry earns its living by trying people and tossing them in jail, not by serving the abstract concept of "justice". We should not be surprised, then, if the industry resists any innovation that might reduce the rate of prosecution or conviction.
Miami has every age of nude and topless females on the beaches. I fail to understand how a still photo can be called porn when these females lay about spread eagle and frolic in the surf. Or if someone decides to make films and photos of these girls is that somehow pornographic? It seems to me that which is legal and open to full public view can hardly be called pornography. And if a man travels with these photos or films or sends them over the net the notion that every hick jurisdiction in America can pass legal judgement upon him is revolting.
The strange thing is they are allegedly trying to protect children by threatening those very children with child porn charges etc.
Couldn't that be viewed as a form of child abuse?
After all if you're really a child and suddenly you face the prospect of being sent to jail and appearing in court etc, wouldn't that have a high chance of scarring you for life?
If I were a child/teen, I'd rather take a caning from my dad than have the full force of the "justice system" being thrown at me.
FWIW, it's easier to escape my dad than it is to escape crazy people throwing the law book at you.
here is a proposal for a scientifically objective method to determine whether a picture constitutes child pornography
Since Justice Potter "I know obscenity when I see it" Stewart died in 1985, that would require communing with the dead.
Depending on how you do it, that is also illegal. :-)
"Prosecuting a child for the law that's suppose to protect the child from older predators is stupid."
Stupid? Why not call it child abuse?
Go show me how it isn't, or would damage the child less than the least of legally recognized forms of child abuse.
I sure wouldn't want any child to be "molested" by the "Justice System".
Well, I don't know about all the others, but I know Rev. Jack Robinson, who began construction of the current church, and I'm confident he's not Satan.
Forget all this nonsense about determining 'whether or not an image is child porn' - it's not just irresolvable, it's a complete red herring, designed to distract you. Far more simply, let's get back to basics: A crime should have a victim. Period.
Any case in which science can give you the ruling is based on bad law. If a completely objective test can tell you whether it's illegal or not, and intent or circumstance or duress or ignorance or incapacity don't matter, then it's bad law and science can't fix bad law.
I find it amusing that to protect children from people seeing them naked we're making them criminals. After all every time I'm naked it ruins my life whereas having a criminal record, losing my right to vote, etc is harmless. Lets destroy then ti save them.
In my day we all traded naughty Polaroids and then used web cams. We never even considered it should be illegal especially when most of us were sexually active. I went to my first orgy when I was 14 (everyone there was underage) and constantly was exposed to sex just hanging out at friend's houses. It's just crazy that we would today be charged with a major crime for having traded pictures. So, I assume these crimes are still crimes after all these years - are they going to arrest me? I'd say 9 out of 10 of the friends I had when I was a teenager traded nude pics of themselves and their hook-ups and we were just average kids so we're going to arrest 90% of the population?
If we consider this a real problem why don't we add something to sex ed classes about it and let parents deal out what punishment they see fit. Making kids into criminals is idiotic.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
The problem with that is that the gray area is simply as wide as the range of all possibilities. Pretending that you can do that classification *objectively* is absurd.
Um, no.
A class photo of Ms. Jones Kindergarten class is clearly legal, even if there are a few people on the planet who would get a rise out of it.
Barring some argument I can't imagine, a video of a man raping a crying 4-year-old girl is clearly illegal. Even if by some stretch you could imagine an argument for a particular video along these lines, 99.99..99% of such videos would be clearly illegal.
While there is a range of grey, the range is a lot narrower than "the range of all possibilities."
Now, whether the range of grey is so wide as to make objective classification for all but the most obvious cases hopeless or not, that's a legitimate question.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
First, I think that there are cases where sending a lascivious image of oneself (as a teenager) to someone else might rise to the level of child pornography. I am not entirely sure if the child should ever be prosecuted (if it was sent for publication, the recipient should be prosecuted if you could prove that).
However, there are some important first amendment issues here to consider as well. My understanding of the current case law allows a child pornography exception to the first amendment to the extent that an action is harmful to specific children. Such work must also be of limited artistic value also (I don't think Mapplethorpe's works could ever be used as the subject of child pornography prosecutions, though obscenity prosecutions might still be possible due to the "community standard" issue). At the same time, it is generally accepted that children do have first amendment rights, and so prosecuting them for activity that would be fundamentally protected for adults but might be otherwise a felony when involving children, and which don't meet the narrow criteria for the exception strikes me as problematic. The solution would be an "as-applied" challenge to the law. In other words one argues in court that the law, as it is applied in this case, is unconstitutional. This is different from a "facial" challenge in that the facial challenge argues that the law is unconstitutional in all applications and therefore should be struck down. An as-applied challenge, if sustained by the court, would simply preclude prosecution in cases where it was valid. Two good cases to read for people interested in these types of challenges are: Wisconsin Right to Life v. FEC (upholding the former's as-applied challenge to election law) and Republican Party of Washington v. Washington State Grange (denying the former's facial challenge to Washington's new primary system).
Note that this is entirely different from the questions of obscenity law, which does not seem to be a harm-based exception. While I think that obscenity laws need to be struck down as unconstitutional due to first and fourth amendment considerations, these are entirely separate from child pornography laws. For example, anime of children involved in sex acts is not child pornography, and the Supreme Court has struck down attempts to bring such material under the domain of child pornography laws, but it may still be prosecuted as obscenity, which brings up various other concerns. The child pornography exception to the first amendment is actually quite narrow, while the obscenity exception is quite broad.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Nope. I wasn't trying to correct the spelling. I just made a typo or spelling error. Hard to say which, as I wasn't thinking real hard about the spelling of that word. I capitalized it as an emphasis on that word because border is definitely not what it was doing.
You occasionally see such reporting, usually in the context of someone photographing their own child or using their own child as part of a "pedophile ring."
If you believe the mass media, and in this case I have no reason to doubt it, most child pornography is manufactured outside the USA, outside the jurisdiction of US courts, by people unknown to the news media. The reason you don't see more "look at the evil child porn producer" is simply because outside of countries that strongly enforce child pornography laws, their identities aren't known to the American press.
Besides, if you are John Q. Public, who do you see as more of a threat to your little darling or niece or granddaughter or her friends, the anonymous child porn producer in Thailand or the person who lives in your city who just got busted for possessing a few hundred child porn photographs? Fear sells. The answer to that drives what you see in the media.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If someone PAYS for child porn, either with cash or barter, or by some other way causes payment to be made such as through an ad-supported medium, he's incentivizing its future production. Morally speaking, he becomes an accessory to future production.
More generally, all the people who create a market for child porn, particularly porn that involves rape, are morally culpable for any future production which is made to fullfill that market.
Now, not all production is made for the purposes of meeting a market, and not all child porn viewing contributes to the demand, but some is and some does. The viewers that contribute to the market for child porn, particularly child rape porn, are in effect encouraging people to create child porn and/or rape children. I have a problem with that. So do most people.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Let's look at the issue from another angle. Child porn is supposedly illegal in order to protect children, yet they are prosecuting children who are producing it, meaning that the intent is not to protect the depicted children but rather children IN GENERAL. This goes hand in hand with the fact that drawings have been criminalized in several countries. There are no real children depicted, thus there are no direct victims. This means the victims must be indirect... But what if it's not even about the actual victims?
I have seen several comments about non-nude drawings of young girls that have been called "disgusting". The question is how can a drawing of a GIRL be disgusting? If the image is sexual yet there is no actual porn or scatology or whatever going on, there is nothing there but a girl, and people are calling her DISGUSTING? As a concrete example, I have heard that very word used about the show Strike Witches. Sure, the show sucks and might possibly be called disgusting for that, but people are complaining about the young girls flashing their panties everywhere and none of the girls are ugly... They're designed to be the very opposite of that. They're drawn to be cute.
There's obviously something else going on here. It's not the picture itself that is the problem, but the idea that someone finds the picture arousing. This explains PERFECTLY why drawings of minors engaged in sexual activities are being made illegal almost everywhere... Because the concept of people getting turned on by that material IS disgusting. Thus, the picture is not important but rather the possibility that someone somewhere might be turned on by it.
I doubt anyone will read this anyway since there are well over 450 comments at the moment.
But here's a good test for you. Use amiasian.com or aminaked.com and keep clicking until you find a photo that looks "possibly illegal" to you. Then click on the photo and see what site it's actually on. You will usually find the photo on a "barely 18" type of site. More than likely you'll find them on the amiasian site since asian girls are smaller.
And no, I don't care for the porn sites to begin with, but this just shows you that there are images out there that, without a context, people do think are porn, when they aren't. A significant number of images to amiasian aren't porn (just naked, or bathing suits.)
...that the same "scientific" procedure is applicable to determining if some photo depicts a witch.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I'm pretty sure anyone with a porn collection unintentionally has at least a few photos of underage people. Trying to determine age can be damn tricky nowadays. Likely almost everyone on slashdot can be charged with possession.
rather than have to walk home where paedophiles lurk on every corner to molest them.
Isn't it ironic, don't you think?
This really raises questions of if it's possible to commit certain classes of crimes against yourself - where you are the perp and the victim.
With child porn, it's expected that the underage child isn't fully giving knowledgeable consent to the deviant photographer. But in this case, the "victim" is the photographer. How does punishing the offender protect society or the victim (self)?
It would be like convicting young boys for molestation for masturbation and throwing them in prison for it. Is society protected, or the "victim" further abused, causing more damage than the actual "offense"?
You implicitly propose that the criminalization of child pornography is based on the following premise:
Then you list a series of counterexamples to that claim: for example, pictures of a car theft are not themselves the theft of the car in question. All that counterexamples show is that a depiction of a criminal act is not in general a criminal act. You're asking us to accept an argument of the following form:
Your counterexamples thus cannot prove the conclusion you actually want us to reach: that it is impossible for any depiction of a criminal act to be a criminal act of the same sort as the original. All the counterexamples show is that depiction of an actual criminal act is not, in itself, the same actual criminal act. But all that means is that one would need additional premises to reach the conclusion in question.
And in fact, the actual sexual abuse of a child is a different crime in the law than the and the creation, distribution and possession of pornographic pictures of the same child. The law isn't making the strawman argument that you want to attribute to it. The premises for judging some specific acts to be criminal are not the same premises used for judging the depiction of those same acts criminal. We have laws against car theft, but no laws against photos of car theft. But on the other hand, we have laws against child sexual abuse, and laws against child pornography. Child pornography isn't a crime because child sexual abuse is a crime and depiction of crimes is a crime; it's a crime because the depiction of child sexual abuse is judged to promote serious crimes against children. (The depiction of car theft, on the other hand, is not judged to lead to crime serious enough to prohibit it.)
Are you adequate?
Because the subject isn't about "children". It's about "females past the age of puberty" (as GP rightly pointed out).
Your ideas are good or at least point to a good idea somewhere in general.
In this particular case, the reasonability stops much earlier in the process. It raises questions like is it even possible for a person to criminally exploit themselves? Why can a minor strip in front of a peer in person, but not in a photo?
Perhaps more deeply, it calls for a review of WHY society doesn't want child porn. The first thought, of course is that it cannot be nmade without exploiting/harming a child. Then we follow on with banning "virtual" child porn because it gives people ideas about real children that we'd rather they didn't have and/or it acts as a cover for actual child porn (and the exploitation that entails).
Any way you look at it, it comes down to preventing harm to children. Of course, any prosecution or threatened prosecution does harm. Thus, prosecuting a child for producing child porn (that is, pictures of themselves) is doing harm in the name of preventing harm to the very same person. It gets crazier when you consider that part of the penalty is to lock them up either with the children they supposedly threaten, or with adults (allegedly it is harmful for a child to hang out with adults as peers). Afterward, they are forbidden to live, work, or associate with themselves (how that might be possible is beyond me).
Generally, when logical reasoning turns up absurdity after absurdity, it's a sign that the framework you're reasoning within is flawed.
The absurdities can be eliminated by defining "production and distribution of child pornography" so that the subject and producer/distributor cannot be the same person.
THEN we should consider objectively what qualifies as child porn. Currently, one is tempted to say that the working definition is whatever gets the DA excited, but they'd rather we didn't mention that given the implications :-)
Except for using the word Science here there is nothing whatsoever to do with Science in this.
That, and the whole issue of what is in the photos is quite irrellevent.
The interesting thing about this case is that the defendants took the photos of THEMSELVES. No matter how explicit the photos were or are, the issue is how can one pornographically exploit ones-self.
The law may be another matter. It may be to hard to judge who motivated the picture taking and rather than allow a grey area the law is ruling all sexual child photos illegal even if the child victim and perpetrator are all one and the same. But that's obviously got some outrageous consequences too.
Deciding if photos are explicit enough to be child porn and the context is a more general issue than this case presents. Child porn in general is a pretty slippery area.
But how can you write such a long rambling article and only focus on the issue which isn't really special in this case? Surely if the children had taken photos of themselves in more explicit ways the issue of pornography against self comes up.
Stupidity is its own reward.
How can a law that was created to protect minors from exploitation be used to punish those whom it was designed to protect. Punishing a minor for a picture that she took of herself is like charging someone with attempted murder for engaging in high risk activities that could potentially result in their own death.
we are turning into the religion-fueled fundamentalists we jointly despise. personally, i think anyone over the age of 35 should be executed. let's start from scratch without all these old fucking douchebags telling us how to live our lives.
So why aren't pictures of murder victims a crime to possess? Someone clearly died for them to be made and I'm sure there are people who get their jollies from looking at them. I know Richard Ramirez's, "The Night Stalker", cousin would get off on showing him pictures of woman he tortured, raped, and murdered while serving in Vietnam. Personally I'd rather have teenagers sending nudie pictures than them sending violent pictures.
People obsessed with sex crimes won't be happy until kids are arrested for looking at themselves naked.
Based on both ancient and recent history, I suggest that this DA be immediately arrested and castrated for being a pedophile. I can give you a 100% guarantee that he masturbates at least 6 times a day to these photos he won't show anyone else.
570-836-3200
Call him up and leave a message!!!
http://www.tunk.com/official/wyoming_county_government.htm#District%20Attorney
Three teenage girls take some pictures of themselves in racy poses an get sued for child porn...
For the Founder Fathers's sake! It's a teen's thing! Just give them a warning, make them do some community work, teach them how to encrypt their personal files, spank their asses and have them promise they won't do it again... But seriously, guys, this is going too far. It's not about a net of perverts raping babies and taking photos of their feats, it's about three teens playing with their cameras and a jerk attorney (and possibly a jerk law/society).
I like your thinking about ways to objectify the process, but offhand I find one major flaw with your lineup design.
In a police lineup a suspect is in the lineup and the suspect is suspected of doing a crime. The person(s) who view the lineup have the task of trying to pick out that suspect because they were a witness and could recognize that individual from the other randomly similar people. This is a way of validating the selection and preventing an innocent person from being the only one in the room, "Yes thats him" giving a wrongful identification.
I think that the idea of charges of "Child Pornography" in this case is a wrongful application of the law. That laws intent was to protect children from preditors, in this case the Child is in jeapordy. What were they thinking? But that's off point.
In the case you suggest of trying to choose whether something is Pornographic or Child Pornographic, it is a discrimination problem. In your lineup none of the pictures might be pornographic, none. But the task of the viewer would be to try to find the one that does not belong, or fits their vision of pornographic. They would have the task to try to pick one, not recognizing the guilty one as in the traditional line up.
Auditors have the same issue. I have know of auditing teams that are sent into a company and told, you must find something wrong. If you don't you failed and probably will not get a bonus or be fired. Of course the IRS is different.
So the problem here is a natural bias to pick something which if the selection of other pictures for some reason are not of the same class, will give you biased picks.
I have the same problem with that kind of bias with trying to find equivalent properties for my Real Estate Tax assessement appeals.
I am not sure how to fix that problem with your design. I think is is an inherent problem with the design. Unless not picking any picture was felt to be a totally acceptable result then the design is flawed. And in legal terms, if the bar is "without a shadow of a doubt" well then it is a much higher bar. That is the bar for the defendant. I don't know of that bar is the same for this kind of subjective classification of evidence.
I'm sure that he took the 3 pics, considered the evidence... took them home to contemplate them more... and eventually with some vasaline and tissues decided that they constitute kiddie porn.
He'll release the pictures as soon as he gets those stains off....
You know, this is a great example of why the Law is an arse.
What is the purpose of this law on child pornography? I would suggest (and I hope that others agree) that it is to protect our children from exploitation and allow them to have a safe childhood and protect them from harm.
Given that, how would these charges protect these children?
The real problem here is, and it's not just a US problem, there is a bit of it going around in Australia too, that those in charge are failing to see the law as a method of protecting our children from harm, but a method to enforce morality.
I'll say it again, just so you can all hear it
The Law DOES NOT exist to enforce morality.
There are certain acts that are illegal and immoral, many of them may be immoral because of their legal status. but the Law is not a tool to enforce morality
These teens did something, something incredibly stupid, but they didn't exploit children, they didn't cause harm to others (themselves, possibly) so I have to say, I'm not sure the Law has a place here.
Having said that, I can see why there is a moral outrage here, but deal with in in a method that suits the act.
Leg Godt!
I thought that the child porn law was there to protect the child involved, not to victimise them further.
tOM
Epitaph: At last! Root access!
Is it just me, or does anyone else here find it disturbing that CmdrTaco put "I-like-the-testing-part" and described the story as "the sextiest" when the subject is about children taking nude pictures of themselves, and testing to see if they are child pornography?
I think it's more disturbing that you think females past the age of puberty are somehow not sexual beings and that having a sexual interest is somehow unnatural and wrong.
I guess its the use of the word "children" as opposed to adolescents or teens or youths.
Natural does not mean right. Rape and murder are natural.
Just because a pubescent girl, say, is sexual does not mean it is right to exploit their burgeoning and not yet properly formed or understood desires in order to get your end off. I can't think of an analogy perhaps giving huge meals to obese kids because they say they're hungry?
A couple of lawyer friends and I had a running argument about the "superiority of scientific thinking over legal thought". My main argument was that science was superior because it tried to uncover the "truth", while both advocates in a criminal case were trying to suppress information inimical to their arguments.
My secondary argument was similar to your thoughts: I maintain it is not possible to be fair and compare relevancy and/or standards if the definitions are fuzzy.
When I grew up, the age of consent was 12 years old in Louisiana, Florida and South Dakota, but 18 in Nebraska. I know at least 4 couples from my graduating class ('66) that got married and dropped out of school before my Junior year because the girl got knocked up. (That was the rule back then; if she gets pregnant, you marry her.) I have a cousin who got pregnant at 15 and married her 30-year-old boyfriend, and they have been married for 54 years. Today he would have spent at least 8 years in prison. I know one girl who lived in my neighborhood who got married at 13 (boyfriend 18) and she was married 26 years before he died. (They say it was a car accident, but I think she might have talked him to death. I never could stand her.)
The problem with standards, particularly arbitrary standards, is that they don't leave any wriggle room for administering JUSTICE. Here in Houston a few years back a nice Mexican kid met a nice Mexican girl, moved in with her and her mother and they lived together for two years. Then they had an argument, and the girl and her mother filed a complaint against him for having sex with a minor. They tried to withdraw the complaint after the young couple made up, but it was out of their hands at that time. Texas has no room for mitigation and extenuation. Even after the Mother and daughter proved that the guy was under the impression she was 18 when they first met (and the mother backed up the girl's lie), it looked like the guy was going to get some prison time and have to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life. Only political pressure on the DA saved the kid.
In another case, again in Houston, a 14 or 15-year-old girl (I forget which) was admitted the hospital to deliver a baby and her "boyfriend" (18) was charged with rape, even though he had been living with the girl for two years, working and contributing to the family well-being. It was very clear that her parents and his parents knew about the relationship, condoned it, and that he was acting responsibly. What saved this guy is that the part of Mexico they came from had a cultural practice of the guy meeting with the girl's father and getting drunk before moving in together, and (since this is what happened in Houston) they would be considered married. An amicus was filed that claimed their relationship constituted a "common law marriage" (still legal in Texas) and the judge and everyone else agreed.
I believe that here in Texas the "spread" is three years; meaning that one party (or both parties) can be minor if there is less than three years difference in their ages. Maybe those girls in question can claim they were engaging in a consensual sex act and, if they are under the spread, get the threat dismissed? (I was going to say they might get off, but the double entendre is too awful....)
I had a book once called, "The Honest Politician's Guide to Crime Control." It had a GREAT argument about the deficiency in the term "statutory rape". The book is out of print now. I guess there wasn't a large enough audience.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
and that young people should be allowed to explore their natures more or less as they please and that if a "crime" doesn't hurt anyone, leave the "criminal" alone...
If she's nude or partially nude, regardless of how inept her raunchy pose is, it's probably pretty clear she meant it to sexually excite whomever she sent it to...
This is an easy problem to solve. Create a website, put a bunch of pictures up there and wait for the ratings to come in.
The real solution is to decriminalize possession of pictures, no matter what the content. Adults involving children in sexual acts should, of course, remain illegal, and automatically covers the creation of child pornography.
Now, obviously one big difference between deciding if the right suspect has been identified in a lineup, and deciding whether an image constitutes child pornography, is that the question of a suspect's identity in a lineup is a question about objective reality, while the question of whether an image is "child pornography" is a matter of opinion and consensus about an imprecisely defined English phrase _______________________________________________ Objective reality? Hardly...Anyone ever read about the failings of "eyewitness testimony"? Often there is no better convincing evidence than the crying victim dramatically pointing to the defendant and saying "That's who raped me (or what have you)." Dr.Gary Wells has been studying eyewitness testimony for the past 20 years or so (and I saw him on 60 minutes in an (I'm told) rerun of a segment on it, but I digress), and basically said it is highly influenced by outside influences because of how memory works: A lot of people think it's like a tape, and you press record. That's untrue. It's a procedural, systematic building block that leads to whatever memory and such is available (For more on it, visit http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/gwells/homepage.htm) On the actual case itself: This judge is clearly a Moral Guardian (in the most literal sense of the word) and is blinded by emotion and the "For The Children (tm)" argument. It's despicable to be honest.
how can a perpetrator be prosecuted if they are also the victim. it's ridiculous that i would be prosecuted for taking a racy picture of myself. What are they worried about, that i'll sexually abuse myself when i get older
Saying that police line-ups are objective or in anyway use the scientific method even in the best case is flawed thinking. Most famously, ask Ronald Cotton and Jennifer Thompson about how accurate line-ups are, or the hundreds and thousands of other people falsely accused based solely on "eye-witness" testimony.
People's memories are faulty and malleable. Morals are similarly malleable. In order to establish a scientific method of identifying content you'd first have to get everyone to agree on the definition of lewd. The first judge or prosecutor that disagrees with that definition based on his local jurisdiction's interpretation or the church he goes, and the scientific method gets thrown out the window due to public outcry or political expediency.
Nice goal in theory and I'm sure people will keep trying but in reality we need to put more emphasis on education, outreach, and understanding than we do on creating a new set of complicated rules that people will eventually skirt anyway.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
If I'm not mistaken, the photos can't be entered as evidence in court without making them available to the defense.
I would not be the least surprised if I am repeating someone, but hey, I'm human. I at least read the full text and a large number of responses. But I didn't find someone I could +1, so here I post:
The text of the article completely, 100%, without a doubt, missed the point. INTENT MATTERS.
If it did not, we would not have degrees of murder. Nor even self defense as a possible full defense. The person TAKING THE PICTURE was NOT intending to exploit the subject of the photo. IT DOES NOT MATTER if the photo is pornographic or not. I. Don't. Care.
If a person 'n' years of age takes a photo of themselves in the same pose as they saw as a model on the cover of ( insert popular magazine here ), is it pornographic? Ah, now we have the subject of the original post. Can we assume the person shooting the photo intended to exploit the subject of the photo ( possibly same person )? No. "Do not assume malice from that which can adequately be explained by human stupidity".
Even #($&*#& Star Trek covered the failure of absolutely applied laws. If we could write laws in the fashion that the author implies there would be no need of human judges. Minimum sentences are damned close to the assumption that we can, in fact, write laws in some sort of Loglan binary code ( I would say 'Black and white', but the irony would be too thick). The assumption is false, and will be until such a time as computers execute Turing tests on *us*, and not the other way around.
The sad thing is we elect ( or fail to punish ) judges who rule nearly along the lines of the vocal minority.
I have no problem at all whatsoever with stupid girls and boys taking pictures of themselves in any state of dress, undress, position, pose etc. The 'problem' is self correcting: ONE of those pics makes the rounds through a high school and I will take odds against the chances of any individual attending that school at that time ever making the same mistake.
However! Anyone buying such pictures instantly wins the 'In need of therapy and a lifetime of close observation' award. Buying? Ditto. Selling, trading ( literal trade, for something of value - not 'Dude! check out this pic of our classmate' ) or soliciting? Well, if our justice system were perfect, I'd be all aboard with castration, chemical or otherwise. But since it is not, significant jail time.
And anyone actually *abusing* my (hypothetical) daughter for such pictures would, in my mind, merit death. Whether they deserve death or not is not at issue. And if I feel that way about my children, I can't really argue if you feel that way for yours, can I?
But what about reality?
I don't know. I started to ignore that in grade school. Lawyers are supposedly smart, ask them. If it involves jail time and criminal records for minors, for stupidity, shoot them and ask others. Repeat as necessary.
Huh! I used to do acid to Blind Faith (Winwood, Clapton et al) about 40 years ago. ... changed! The REAL original, I now discovered, had a naked adolescent girl on it. OMG! But... strangely, my kids seemed non-plussed.
No need for "counseling", thank goodness...
... rest of my life in jail?
Great album. A few years ago I decided to buy the CD to let my kids appreciate it,(ain't updates great?) and was shocked... no, mildly titillated (this is a pun) to see the cover had
Wanna see the original cover? Look at Blind Faith
Holy shit! It ain't there anymore! The 12 yr-old girl is GONE!
Migod, it gets scarier! Thanx, Wikipedia!
But, I still have the album cover here. Bought from Columbia Records, no less. Will the porn-cops pounce on me now?
Ummn, I cannot even find the "porno" cover on the internet now! I'd scan my copy, and upload it, but
Fuckin' freaky American preverts!
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- aqk
F U
... I think that's the real issue people can't deal with. Nature doesn't care who or what you are attracted to, you just are.
The fact that is most men and women are attracted to the what they are attracted to and good looks regardless of age.
We've probably all seen this time and time again, when a beautiful little girl who we all know is going to grow up to be a looker enters the room and EVERYONE (men and women) damn well treats her sweeter then everyone else as well as getting a lot of the attention.
Truth be told, a lot of men and women (and kids nearing puberty, etc) are going to experiment in their imagination things that are NC17 rated or worse, and this has been going on since the beginning of time, if we dumped out all the dirty sexual thoughts people thought, I'd bet 99% of the world would be convicted of something they public ally decry.
Humans are still wild animals, despite their big brains, people just don't want to accept it.
I have a hunch that this DA is angling for Attorney General and beyond-- power and money does give people an insatiable urge for greater ambitions. If as a prosecutor he drops the charges against the girls, it makes him seem weak to the law enforcement community, which in turn weakens his chances of that coveted AG election victory. Erect the false image of a crime fighter with a perfect record of protecting the community's kids, and he is often a shoe-in, despite the fact that taking a chainsaw to civil liberties like this endangers him and everyone else in the country.
Or he's a jackass who's defending himself despite the fact that people are pointing out the weaknesses in parts of his case. These are easily correctable weaknesses, which the defense attorney will no doubt exploit as the prosecutor with an axe to grind and rounding up kids whose only offense is doing stupid things. Unfortunately, many prosecutors in such cases sway the jury by invoking moral arguments based on tradition or some other means of ignoring the glaring legal errors-- it's a game of smoke and mirrors to cloak away the reasonable doubt.
Either way, he is exploiting an increasing hysteria of "save the children" that IMO is rooted in religious circles, particularly ones whose statements of belief encourage or order their followers to ignore the Constitutional restriction on the US government against legislating religious values. I'm beginning to think that Bush was the tipping point here-- if he didn't care about the laws that may have forbidden him to do what he believed to be right, why should the religious groups who so overwhelmingly aligned themselves to him?
This zeal to do what they think is right gives them a myopia that prevents them from predicting the consequences of their goals. Even when hundreds of soldiers were falling in Iraq, even when the allegations of warrantless wiretapping surfaced, even when the conservative-oriented government allowed parts of our infrastructure to fail catastrophically, even when FEMA bungled the aftermath of Katrina, I had Christian friends who believed Bush was a great leader despite the fact that they primarily voted for him because he promised to kill Roe v. Wade. That is myopia to the point of blindness, and that is why they should never have allowed politics to enter their churches in the first place.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
For stuff like beer and tobacco, the test would be on the health risks.
No, there should be two tests here, just like for the driver's license. The first test is a written one (like you mention) on the health risks and safety precautions. The second test is a physical test to see if they can handle their shit (under supervision, of course). I would like to see all drugs subject to this sort of licensing procedure, and get rid of those silly teetotaller laws.
Knowledge != Intelligence
This editorial is well and good, but it's barking up the wrong tree.
Okay, so it's a problem to define what exactly "pornography" is, and it may be worthwhile to look into that, though I seriously question the practicality of the suggested approaches here.
But the much more OBVIOUS injustice, that is also easier to fix is the NONSENSE that a person can be convicted of producing and posessing child-porn for the crime of taking nudie-pics (explicit or not!) of THEMSELVES.
There can be no doubt whatsoever that the laws regarding production, posession and distribution of child-porn should be changed in such a manner that you could never break them with pictures of *yourself*. It just makes zero sense. Putting a 15-year old girl on the "sex offenders" list for life, because she used her mobile-phone to take photos of HERSELF ? That's just braindead.
Also; a 13 year old boy who is interested in 13 year-old girls is not a pedophile -- he is "normal".
It's not a new idea. The age of consent works like that already in many countries (including Norway and Germany), the age of consent in general is 16. But there is no punishment for breaking it if the participants are similar in age or development. So none of this "two 15-year-olds sleep with eachother, let's label both sex-offenders!" bullshit.
I think the same should be true for photos. A 25 year old has no business taking, posessing or distributing explicit images of a 14-year-old, and it's fair to label that "child-porn". If the same 14-year old takes photos of herself and send to her 15-year-old boyfriend, then the same label is obvious NONSENSE.
I have another idea. It's illegal to visit pages with nude teen girls in photos?
just send to your politics an email with an essay about something random as you say.. and link to the compromising pages with tinyurl and..... PROFIT!
re: "Also, it's probably not a good idea to make this an option for child pornography defendants who decide to represent themselves, so that they can rifle through thousands of photographs of naked children, even legal ones, to find the pictures that they think are the "sexiest" to use for their defense.)" Were any scientist to consciously manipulate his/her data it would represent unethical behaviour. Your 'scientific method' boils down to 'opinion' rather being based upon facts. Science deals with facts. It is wrong to attempt to disguise non-facts as being otherwise.
"There are 11 kinds of people: those who know binary, those who don't, and those who could not care less!"
yay slashdot, where suggesting that porn might not be good for 11 year olds is modded down
dr.
There might be some possible solutions to poor judgment like this. First, something like this should go before a grand jury. Any prosecutor worth his or her salt can get anything past a grand jury. But if you allowed the defendant to have legal representation in the indictment process (as opposed to a one sided process), you introduce an opportunity to dismiss the potential charge before it does harm to the defendant. Second, if the appeals court feels that a prosecutor over stepped his bounds (to play on populist attitudes that generally are contrary to the law or for any other reason) and that the prosecutor should have used better judgment, they should be able to recommend the removal of the prosecutor or at least some serious disciplinary action. This might make grand standing to win the upcoming election more risky. Perhaps, if a Prosecutor has three such actions against him he should be impeached. Citizens have a right to have a prosecutor with common sense and sound knowledge of the law and to have the ability to remove someone from office if his superiors find repeatedly that he does not have those "advertised" qualities. This case would not have happened in many parts of the country. This prosecutor obviously holds the same conservative or religious values as those who elected him and he actually thinks he's doing the right thing. There also should be a preliminary hearing process where the court appoints a child advocate to argue exactly the same type of arguments made in this forum--that prosecuting the victim is not what the law intended, etc. The judge should be able to throw the matter out before it proceeds based on this alone or order the prosecutor to break down the charges to a more realistic charge such as juvenile delinquency or disorderly conduct or whatever "fits" local laws best. I once worked as a legislative assistant for a Member of Congress. The boss hates anti porn bills because no matter how unconstitutional it was, he couldn't vote against it and expect the voters of our district to understand. They were too conservative. So he and others sometimes inserted provisions that would make them unconstitutional so he was seen as opposing demon porno and at the same time know it would be overturned by the courts and go away. Prosecutors may feel the same pressures. Maybe one ten year term with no re-election opportunity would solve this. Kelly